Common HEP UNIX Environment: HEPiX Shells
Arnaud Taddei for the HEPiX Shells Scripts Working Group
In the previous issue of CNL (CNL 220) we published an article (2.3 in
Desktop Computing) introducing the Common HEP UNIX Environment. Since then
a lot of work had been done and a new version
had been introduced in production recently on ASIS at CERN.
This new version also has a new HEPiX X11 environment part which is
described in another article in this newsletter.
As well as a full internal
reorganisation of the scripts to have a cleaner architecture, we
took the opportunity to add the following features
- improvements in the behaviour of the scripts in BATCH mode,
- some new options such as
- an option to be warned about AFS token
expiration if you are an AFS user (this exists for the two
recommended shells tcsh and zsh)
- an option to specify from which group you want
to get customisation files if you belong to several
groups
- an option to put all your portable scripts in a dedicated directory
in your Home directory
optimisation of the scripts using some preprocessing tools which
produce optimised target programs for each supported platform
porting of the shell scripts to new platforms including AIX4, HP-UX10,
Digital UNIX (OSF1) 3.2
improvements in the behaviour and documentation of the uco command
which is the "reset button" you can use when your environment is in an
unknown state.
A more complete list of features is given at:
http://wwwcn.cern.ch/hepix/wg/scripts/doc/version/Version.html
We have attempted to provide a reasonable working default while leaving the
scripts customisable
by system and/or group administrators if they want to offer a service
which is exactly tailored to the needs of the users they support.
Users can consult a User Guide and system administrators
can consult a System Administrators Guide.
Both guides are accessible at:
http://wwwcn.cern.ch/hepix/wg/scripts/www/Welcome.html
These scripts are now more and more popular and used at many sites:
CERN, DESY Hamburg, DESY Zeuthen, Pisa, RAL, etc. At CERN all the PLUS
and workgroup services are using them now. Existing experiments are now
using it in a wider scale.
Arnaud Taddei